Open borders are a gift to organised criminals

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General crime is at a low level throughout the UK, thanks to better technology, a better trained police force, and a more benign society. But all is not well. There are three growing areas of crime that we are seriously worried about: fraud and cyber­ crime, radical Islamic terrorism and serious organised crime.

Fraud and cyber crime is estimated to be running at over £50 billion a year. While it affects everyone, only a small number of cases (about five per cent) are actually investigated. At the moment this is done by Action Fraud and the City of London Police. But we need a dedicated agency to do it, with skilled IT graduates recruited straight from university. It should be set up along the lines of GCHQ and should have a detachment with every force.

Vitally, this would free up manpower to deal with the more serious areas of concern. The greatest threat to our social stability at the moment is the fact that we have weakened our border controls at a time when they should have been strengthened. Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, border control within the EU is almost non­ existent; once someone is in Europe, they can travel almost without restriction. Naturally, they tend to gravitate to the most successful areas – Germany and the UK – and there is an understandable political will within the rest of Europe to let this happen.

Until we can control our borders and our sovereignty the current situation can only deteriorate further

But as we well know, within this movement of people there is a small but significant number who wish us harm and who wish to impose their unpalatable beliefs upon us. Their ideology has more in common with extreme fascism than anything else and their anti-Semitism is as profound as that of Nazi Germany.

It is unacceptable, yet we allow it to come to our country and flourish. Furthermore, we have allowed its proponents to advise the Home Office, to preach in our mosques, and to spread their creed in our prisons. They seek to destroy the very freedoms that they lacked in their own countries. We need to wake up to, and take far more seriously, the threat they pose to our safety and to our country.

Meanwhile, Eastern European criminals have spotted an opportunity. The pickings are far easier in a rich liberal country such as ours, than in their own poorer countries; our legal system is much kinder should they be caught; and their ability to leave the country while on bail makes the threat of imprisonment at best weak. As a result, much more serious organised crime, controlled from abroad, is operating in to the UK. And as the EU increases its membership, with more Eastern European nations joining, such as Albania, the situation can only worsen. Already, the increase in murder rates and serious violence across the UK is now beginning to reflect this. In an attempt to contain it, and as a direct consequence of our inability to control our borders, we will see the arming of yet more police officers on our streets.

At the same time, the rapid increase in our population, also caused in large part by our open borders, is making it harder for us to deal with these threats. Our hospitals, our schools, our housing, our transport system, our energy capacity, our prisons, our court system, and our local councils, are all stretched to breaking point. This inevitably impinges on the police, the service of last resort. So why has our funding been cut so substantially at a time when we are needed more keenly than ever?

To keep up with the population increase in the Thames Valley alone we should have been increasing our numbers by at least 200 a year. Yet we have, in real terms, cut £82 million a year from the police budget. That would pay for more than 1,000 extra officers. Greater efficiency, modern technology, and better collaboration between police forces and other services have lessened the impact of the cuts, but the police are now seriously overstretched.

There is much talk at government level about what is being done, but in reality little is; the EU prevents us from implementing the most elementary precautions that need to be put in place. And so the promise to control immigration has failed.

The police will, naturally, do their utmost to control crime and prevent disorder, but without being given the finances to do so or any curbs put on immigration, this will become increasingly difficult. Yet more money is now spent on overseas aid than on either our police or border control. The fault lies not with the Home Office, but with the Treasury. Throughout the UK, money is wasted on well-intentioned infrastructure programmes, while even more is spent subsidising Europe. The vast sums we pour into the EU have no auditable trail, no democratic oversight, and much is wasted or ends up in criminal hands.

Until we can control our borders and our sovereignty the current situation can only deteriorate further. We need a far more realistic approach to how we spend our money. It’s time for a change of direction – and we need it fast.